A digital destination for Persian culture

A one-stop cultural hub

Bazaar Ventures, an entrepreneurial kick-starter, looked to Ayantek for help with designing and implementing an online cultural hub specifically for the Persian community. The goal of the hub was to create a unique platform that will provide browsing convenience and help site users find resources relevant to the Persian Community in one place, eliminating the need for visiting individual websites. This one-stop browsing destination, will aggregate the best the web has to offer in terms of news, videos, shopping, recipes, entertainment and other resources. Ayantek was selected to conceive, design, and build a new responsive website offering content in both Farsi and English.

The SMAC Stack Insights

When designing a responsive application for multiple languages, test each language with content to identify potential layout issues across different screen resolutions.

Look right-to-left and left-to-right

One of the more unique user experience challenges for the Foozool portal was to design a layout that allows users to seamlessly toggle languages between Farsi and English. Farsi is based on the Arabic script and is read right-to-left, while English is read left-to-right. This required a site design and layout that supports both language directions. Another unique challenge was the requirement to display page content from multiple external sources. Each of the sources provides content in a disparate, non-linear, unstructured fashion, so the site experience needs to remove all of the inconsistencies and display the content in a manner that is visually pleasing and easy to read. Ayantek’s team of user experience designers worked closely with the customer team to define the best structure and layout to achieve these unique design challenges. The end result is a user experience that is simple, usable and encourages repeat visitors.

Developing the digital destination

The hub content will be fueled by aggregating data from over 500 independent and disparate sources requiring a complex technical solution to gather the data, cleanse it and categorize the content for display multiple times each day. Our expert engineers designed an intelligent automated solution and built a system to scan each of the designated sources and prepare the content for end user consumption. The solution also includes the capability to alert site managers about content extremities that require manual resolution and incorporates advanced automated image scaling and cropping techniques to create a consistent look and feel across all of the aggregated content. Content of different formats (e.g. videos, live TV streams, music) are streamlined for delivery through a rich, filter-based navigation approach that allows consumers to easily find the content they are looking for. Farsi users with limited English language capabilities are able to utilize language tools for Farsi-specific translation, pronunciation and dictionary searches.

A digital phoenix rising from the ashes

Foozool-It.com was successfully launched in March of 2018. Offering quick access to Persian News, Entertainment, Sports, and Food content in one single digital destination is a fantastic innovation envisioned by Bazaar Ventures. Through this one-stop model, Foozool-It.com brings convenience, value and unprecedented ease of access to a single platform. Ayantek’s team of digital strategists, designers and engineers collaborated closely with customer stakeholders at every stage of process to make their vision come true. Early reviews from consumers have been spectacular, relative to its simplicity, organization, and intuitiveness of the site. With positive traffic growth and repeat site visits from the target audience Foozool-It.com is rapidly growing to be the digital destination for the Persian audience.

“The Ayantek team displayed hard work and commitment throughout the project and particularly during the last stretch through launch. We couldn’t be more pleased with both the functionality and aesthetics of the site. We have received very positive feedback from end users, many of which have commented they’ve never seen a high-quality site like this tailored so specifically for the Persian immigrant community. Simply put, the rich design and complex automation that makes this unique site the success that it is could not have been possible without Ayantek’s first-rate talent. As a startup company with a tight timeline and budget, Ayantek’s “bang for the buck” value-add should not be overlooked or understated! Kudos to the entire team.”

– Afshin Jaber, CEO / Founder

About Ayantek

Ayantek is a digital strategy and solutions firm focused on delivering value through Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC) technologies to some of the world’s largest organizations. Our global consultants based in Boston and India are industry experts with decades of experience conceiving, designing, building, and managing interactive programs that drive measurable improvements and deliver competitive advantages for our clients. We help our customers achieve market leadership through a combination of strategic thought leadership, exceptional user experiences, and industry-leading proprietary and open-source technologies.